LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 




JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
Bn BDDre06 

BY y 

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




NEW YORK 



HARPER AND BROTHERS 
1892 



-jio/ 



X 



Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 

All rights reserved. 



IZ-3IJ'I 



In the letter of Augustus Graham, the found- 
er of the Brooklyn Institute, dated July 4, 1848, 
accompanying the gift of the property to the 
Board of Trustees, he says : " I give this sum 
with the injunction to your Board . . , that 
one-half of the net income from the buildino-s 
apply to the increase and keeping in order of 
the free library of the Institute, the residue of 
said income to be applied in part to the ex- 
pense of an address to be delivered on the even- 
ing of the 22d of February, the birthday of 
George Washington, on the character of that 
great man, or of some other benefactor of 
America. " 

Mr. Lowell had hoped, should his health 
permit, to deliver the address on the 22d of 
February, 1892. Upon his death, on the 12th 



of August, 1891, it was decided that, in accord- 
ance with the provision of Mr. Graham's letter, 
the annual address of this year should be a dis- 
course in commemoration of Mr. Lowell. 
March i, 1892, 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 




HE birthday of Washington 
not only recalls a great his- 
toric figure, but it reminds 
us of the quality of great 
citizenship. His career is 
at once our inspiration and our rebuke. 
Whatever is lofty, fair, and patriotic in 
public conduct, instinctively we call by 
his name ; whatever is base, selfish, and 
unworthy, is shamed by the lustre of his 
life. Like the flaming sword turning ev- 
ery way that guarded the gate of Para- 
dise, Washington's example is the beacon 
shining at the opening of our annals and 
lighting the path of our national life. 



8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

But the service that makes great cit- 
izenship is as various as genius and tem- 
perament. Washington's conduct of the 
war was not more valuable to the country 
than his organization of the Government, 
and it was not his special talent but his 
character that made both of those serv- 
ices possible. In public affairs the glam- 
our of arms is always dazzling. It is the 
laurels of Miltiades, not those of Homer, 
or Solon, or Gorgias,which disturb and in- 
spire the young Themistocles. But while 
military glory stirs the popular heart, it is 
the traditions of national grandeur, the 
force of noble character, immortal works 
of literature and art, which nourish the 
sentiment that makes men patriots and 
heroes. The eloquence of Demosthenes 
aroused decadent Greece at least to strike 
for independence. The song of Koerner 
fired the resistless charge of Lutzow's 
cavalry. A pamphlet of our Revolution 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 9 

revived the flickering flame of colonial 
patriotism. The speech, the song, the 
written word, are deeds no less than the 
clash of arms at Cheronea and Yorktown 
and Gettysburg. 

It is not only Washington the soldier 
and the statesman, but Washington the 
citizen, whom we chiefly remember. 
Americans are accused of making an ex- 
cellent and patriotic Virginia gentleman 
a mythological hero and demi-god. But 
what mythological hero or demi-god is a 
figure so fair.^ We say nothing of him 
to-day that was not said by those who 
saw and knew him, and in phrases more 
glowing than ours, and the concentrated 
light of a hundred years discloses nothing 
to mar the nobility of the incomparable 
man. ^ 

It was while the personal recollections 
and impressions of him were still fresh, 
while as Lowell said, " Boston was not 



lO JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

yet a city and Cambridge was still a 
country village," that Lowell was born in 
Cambridge seventy-three years ago to- 
day. His birth on Washington's birth- 
day seems to me a happy coincidence, 
because each is so admirable an illustra- 
tion of the two forces whose union has 
made America. Massachusetts and Vir- 
ginia, although of very different origin and 
character, were the two colonial leaders. 
In Virginia politics, as in the aristocratic 
salons of Paris on the eve of the French 
revolution, there was always a theoretical 
democracy ; but the spirit of the State 
was essentially aristocratic and conserva- 
tive. Virginia was the Cavalier of the 
Colonies, Massachusetts was the Puritan ; 
and when John Adams, New England per- 
sonified, said in the Continental Congress 
that Washington ought to be General, 
the Puritan and the Cavalier clasped 
hands. The union of Massachusetts and 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. II 

Virginia for that emergency foretold the 
final union of the States, after a mighty- 
travail of difference, indeed, and long 
years of strife. 

The higher spirit of conservatism, its 
reverence for antiquity, its susceptibility 
to the romance of tradition, its instinct 
for continuity and development, and its 
antipathy to violent rupture ; the grace 
and charm and courtesy of established 
social order, in a word, the feminine ele- 
ment in national life, however far from 
actual embodiment in Virginia or in any 
colony, was to blend with the masculine 
force and creative energy of the Puritan 
spirit and produce all that we mean by 
America. This was the consummation 
which the Continental Congress did not 
see, but which was none the less forecast 
when John Adams summoned Washing- 
ton to the chief revolutionary command. 
It is the vision which still inspires the life 



12 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

and crowns the hope of every generous 
American, and it has had no truer inter- 
preter and poet than Lowell. Well was 
he born on the anniversary of Washing- 
ton's birth, for no American was ever 
more loyal to the lofty spirit, the gran- 
deur of, purpose, the patriotic integrity; 
none ever felt more deeply the scorn of 
ignoble and canting Americanism, which 
invest the name of Washington with im- 
perishable glory. 

The house in which Lowell was born 
has long been known as Elmwood, a 
stately house embowered in lofty trees, 
still full, in their season, of singing birds. 
It is one of the fine old mansions of which 
a few yet linger in the neighborhood of 
Boston, and it still retains its dignity of 
aspect, but a dignity somewhat impaired 
by the encroaching advance of the city 
and of the architectural taste of a later 
day. The house had its traditions, for it 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 1 3 

was built before the Revolution by the last 
loyal Lieutenant-governor of Massachu- 
setts, whose stout allegiance to the Brit- 
ish crown was never shaken, and who left 
New England with regret when New Eng- 
land, also not without natural filial re- 
gret, left the British empire. It is a le- 
gend of Elmwood that Washington was 
once its guest, and after the Revolution it 
was owned by Elbridge Gerry, a signer of 
the Declaration of Independence, who 
occupied it when he was Vice-president. 
Not far from Elmwood, Lowell's life- 
long home, is the house which is doubly 
renowned as the headquarters of Wash- 
ington and the home of Longfellow. 
Nearer the colleges stands the branching 
elm — twin heir with the Charter Oak of 
patriotic story — under which Washington 
took command of the revolutionary army. 
Indeed, Cambridge is all revolutionary 
ground, and rich with revolutionary tra- 



14 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

dition. Lexington common is but six 
miles away. Along the West Cambridge 
road galloped Paul Revere to Concord. 
Yonder marched the militia to Bunker 
Hill. Here were the quarters in which 
Burgoyne's red coats were lodged after 
the surrender at Saratoga. But peaceful 
among the storied scenes of war stands 
the university, benign mother of educated 
New England, coeval with the Puritan 
settlement which has given the master 
impulse to American civilization. 

The American is fortunate who, like 
Lowell, is born among such historic scenes 
and local associations, and to whose cra- 
dle the good fairy has brought the gift of 
sensitive appreciation. His birthplace 
was singularly adapted to his genius and 
his taste. The landscape, the life, the fig- 
ures of Cambridge constantly appear both 
in his prose and verse, but he lays little 
stress upon the historic reminiscence. It 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 1 5 

is the picturesqueness, the character, the 
humor of the Hfe around him which at- 
tract him. This apparent indifference to 
the historic charm of the neighborhood 
is illustrated in a little story that Lowell 
tells of his first visit to the White Mount- 
ains. In the Franconia Notch he stopped 
to chat with a recluse in a saw-mill busy 
at work, and asked him the best point of 
view for the Old Man of the Mountain. 
The busy workman answered : " Dun no; 
never see it." Lowell continues, "too 
young and too happy to feel or affect the 
Juvenalian indifference I was sincerely 
astonished, and I expressed it. The log- 
compelling man attempted no justifica- 
tion, but after a little while asked, ' Come 
from Bawsn ?' * Yes,' with peculiar 
pride. 'Goodie to see in the vicinity of 
Bawsn ?' ' Oh, yes,' I said. * I should 
like — awl I should like to stan' on Bun- 
ker Hill. You've been there often, like- 



l6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

ly ?' ' No-o,' unwillingly seeing the little 
end of the horn in clear vision at the 
terminus of this Socratic perspective. 
* Awl, my young fren' you've larned now 
that wut a man kin see any day he never 
does see ; nawthin pay, nawthin vally !' " 
Lowell entered college at fifteen and 
graduated at nineteen, in 1838. His lit- 
erary taste and talent were already evi- 
dent, for in literature even then he was 
an accomplished student, and he was the 
poet of his class, although at the close of 
his last year he was rusticated at Concord, 
a happy exile, where he saw Emerson, and 
probably Henry Thoreau and Margaret 
Fuller, who was often a guest in Emer- 
son's house. It was here that he wrote 
the class poem which gave no melodious 
hint of the future man, and disclosed the 
fact that this child of Cambridge, al- 
though a student, was as yet wholly un- 
influenced by the moral and intellectual 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 1 7 

agitation called derisively transcendent- 
alism. 

Of this agitation John Quincy Adams 
writes in his diary in 1840 : "A young man 
named Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of 
my once -loved friend William Emerson, 
and a classmate of my lamented son 
George, after failing in the every -day 
avocation of a Unitarian preacher and 
school-master, starts a new doctrine of 
transcendentalism ; declares all the old 
revelations superannuated and worn out, 
and announces the approach of new rev- 
elations and prophecies. Garrison and 
the non-resistant Abolitionists, Brownson 
and the Marat Democrats, phrenology 
and animal magnetism all come in, fur- 
nishing each some plausible rascality as 
an ingredient for the bubbling cauldron 
of religion and politics." There could be 
no better expression of the bewildered 
and indignant consternation with which 
3 



1 8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

the old New England of fifty years ago 
regarded the awakening of the newer 
New England, of which John Quincy 
Adams himself was to be a characteristic 
leader, and which was to liberalize still 
further American thought and American 
politics, enlarging religious liberty, and 
abolishing human slavery. Like other 
Boston and Harvard youth of about his 
time, or a little earlier, Charles Sumner, 
Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Loth- 
rop Motley, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Low- 
ell seemed to be born for studious leisure 
or professional routine, as yet unheeding 
and unconscious of the real forces that 
were to mould his life. Of these forces 
the first and the most enduring was an 
early and happy passion for a lovely and 
high-minded woman who became his 
wife — the Egeria who exalted his youth 
and confirmed his noblest aspirations; a 
heaven-eyed counsellor of the serener air 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Ig 

who filled his mind with peace and his 
life with joy. 

During these years Lowell greatly im- 
pressed his college comrades, although 
no adequate literary record of the prom- 
ise which they felt survives. When he 
left college and studied law the range of 
his reading was already extraordinarily 
large, and his observation of nature sin- 
gularly active and comprehensive. His 
mind and memory, like the Green Vaults 
of Dresden, were rich with treasures accu- 
mulated from every source. But his ear- 
liest songs echoed the melodies of other 
singers and foretold no fame. They were 
the confused murmuring of the bird while 
the dawn is deepening into day. Partly 
his fastidious taste, his conservative dis- 
position, and the utter content of happy 
love, lapped him in soft Lydian airs which 
the angry public voices of the time did 
not disturb. But it was soon clear that 



20 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

the young poet whose early verses sang 
only his own happiness would yet fulfil 
Schiller's requirement that the poet shall 
be a citizen of his age as well as of his 
country. 

One of his most intimate friends, the 
late Charles F. Briggs, for many years a 
citizen of Brooklyn, and known in the lit- 
erary New York of forty years ago as 
Harry Franco, said of him, with fine in- 
sight, that Lowell was naturally a politi- 
cian, but a politician like Milton — a man, 
that is to say, with an instinctive grasp of 
the higher politics, of the duties and re- 
lations of the citizen to his country, and 
of those moral principles which are as es- 
sential to the welfare of States as oxygen 
to the breath of human life. " He will 
never narrow himself to a party which 
does not include mankind," said his friend, 
" nor consent to dally with his muse when 
he can invoke her aid in the cause of the 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 21 

oppressed and suffering." This was the 
just perception of affectionate intimacy. 
It foretold not only literary renown but 
patriotic inspiration, and consequent po- 
litical influence in its truest and most 
permanent form. In Lowell's mind, as in 
Milton's, as in the spirit of the great 
Dutch revolt against Spain, of the later 
German defiance of Napoleon, and of the 
educated young heroes of union and lib- 
erty in our own Civil War, the words of 
Sir Philip Sidney to Hubert Languet 
presently glowed with quickening truth : 
" To what purpose should our thought be 
directed to various kinds of knowledge 
unless room be afforded for putting it 
into practice so that public advantage 
may be the result." It was not a Puritan 
nor a republican who wrote the words, 
but they contain the essential spirit of 
Puritan statesmanship and scholarship 
on both sides of the ocean. 



22 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

The happy young scholar at Elm wood, 
devoted to literature and love, and un- 
heeding the great movement of public af- 
fairs, showed from time to time that be- 
neath the lettered leisure of his life there 
lay the conscience and moral virility that 
give public effect to genius and accom- 
plishment. Lowell's development as a 
literary force in public affairs is uncon- 
sciously and exquisitely portrayed in the 
prelude to Sir Launfal in 1848. 

" Over his keys the musing organist 

Beginning doubtfully and far away, 
First lets his fingers wander as they list, 

And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay; 
Then as the touch of his loved instrument 

Gives hope and fervor, nearer draws his theme, 
First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent 

Along the wavering vista of his dream." 

In 1884-45 his theme was no longer 
doubtful or far away. Although Mr. Gar- 
rison and the early abolitionists refused 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 23 

to vote, as an act sanctioning a govern- 
ment which connived at slavery, yet the 
slavery question had already mastered 
American politics. In 1844 the Texas con- 
troversy absorbed public attention, and in 
that and the following year Lowell's po- 
ems on Garrison, Phillips, Giddings, Pal- 
frey, and the capture of fugitive slaves 
near Washington, like keen flashes leap- 
ing suddenly from a kindling pyre, an- 
nounced that the antislavery cause had 
gained a powerful and unanticipated ally 
in literature. These poems, especially 
that on " The Present Crisis," have a 
Tyrtean resonance, a stately rhetorical 
rhythm, that make their dignity of 
thought, their intense feeling, and pictu- 
resque imagery, superbly effective in rec- 
itation. They sang themselves on every 
antislavery platform. Wendell Phillips 
winged with their music and tipped with 
their flame the darts of his fervid appeal 



24 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

and manly scorn. As he quoted them 
with suppressed emotion in his low, me- 
lodious, penetrating voice, the white 
plume of the resistless Navarre of elo- 
quence gained loftier grace, that relent- 
less sword of invective a more flashing 
edge. 

The last great oration of Phillips was 
the discourse at Harvard University on 
the centenary of the Phi Beta Kappa. It 
was not the least memorable in that long 
series of memorable orations at Harvard 
of which the first in significance was 
Buckminster's in 1809, and the most fa- 
miliar was Edward Everett's in 1824, its 
stately sentences culminating in the mag- 
nificent welcome to Lafayette who was 
present. It was the first time that Phil- 
lips had been asked by his Alma Mater to 
speak at one of her festivals, and he 
rightly comprehended the occasion. He 
was never more himself, and he held an 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 25 

audience culled from many colleges and 
not predisposed to admire, in shuddering 
delight by the classic charm of his man- 
ner and the brilliancy of his unsparing 
censure of educated men as recreant to 
political progress. The orator was nearly 
seventy years old. He was conscious 
that he should never speak again upon a 
greater occasion nor to a more distin- 
guished audience, and as his discourse 
ended, as if to express completely the 
principle of his own life and of the cause 
to which it had been devoted, and the 
spirit which alone could secure the happy 
future of his country if it was to justify 
the hope of her children, he repeated the 
words of Lowell : 

** New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient 
good uncouth. 
They must upward still and onward who would keep 

abreast of truth. 
Lo ! before us gleam her camp fires, we ourselves 
must i)ilgrims be, 
4 



26 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

Launch our Mayflower and steer boldly through the 
desperate winter sea. 

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood- 
rusted key." 

When Lowell wrote the lines he was 
twenty-five years old. He was thorough- 
ly stirred by the cause which Edmund 
Quincy in reply to Motley's question, 
" What public career does America of- 
fer ?" had declared to be " the noblest in 
the world." But Lowell felt that he was 
before all a poet. When he was twenty- 
seven he wrote, " If I have any vocation 
it is the making of verse. When I take 
my pen for that, the world opens itself un- 
grudgingly before me ; everything seems 
clear and easy, as it seems sinking to the 
bottom would be, as one leans over the 
edge of his boat in one of those dear 
coves at Fresh Pond. But when I do 
prose it is invita Minerva. I feel as if I 
were wasting time and keeping back my 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 27 

message. My true place is to serve the 
cause as a poet. Then my heart leaps be- 
fore me into the conflict." Already the 
musing organist had ceased to dream, and 
he was about to strike a chord in a 
strange and unexpected key, and with a 
force to which the public conscience 
would thrill in answer. 

Lowell was an intense New Englander. 
There is no finer figure of the higher 
Puritan type. The New England soil 
from which he sprang was precious to 
him. The New England legend, the New 
England language. New England charac- 
ter and achievement, were all his delight 
and familiar study. Nobody who could 
adequately depict the Yankee ever knew 
him as Lowell knew him, for he was at 
heart the Yankee that he drew. The 
Yankee early became the distinctive rep- 
resentative of America. He is the Uncle 
Sam of comedy and caricature. Even the 



28 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

sweet-souled Irving could not resist the 
universal laugh, and gave it fresh occasion 
by his portrait of Ichabod Crane. Those 
who preferred the cavalier and courtier 
as a national type, traced the Yankee's 
immediate descent from the snivelling, 
sanctimonious, and crafty zealots of Crom- 
well's parliament. Jack Downing and 
Sam Slick, the coarser farces and stories 
broadly exaggerated this conception, and, 
in our great controversy of the century, 
the antislavery movement was derided 
as the superserviceable, sneaking fanati- 
cism of the New England children of 
Tribulation Wholesome and Zeal-in-the- 
land-Busy, whom the southern sons of 
gallant cavaliers and gentlemen would 
teach better morals and manners. The 
Yankee was made a byword of scorn, and 
identified with a disturber of the nation- 
al peace and the enemy of the glorious 
Union. Many a responsible citizen, many 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 29 

a prosperous merchant in New York and 
Boston and Philadelphia, many a learned 
divine, whose honor it was that they were 
Yankees, felt a half-hearted shame in the 
name, and grudged the part played by 
their noses in the conversation. They 
seemed perpetually to hear a voice of con- 
tempt saying, "Thy nose bewrayeth thee." 
This was the figure which, with the in- 
stinct of genius, with true New England 
pride and the joy of conscious power, 
Lowell made the representative of liber- 
ty - loving, generous, humane, upright, 
wise, conscientious, indignant America. 
He did not abate the Yankee a jot or a 
tittle. He magnified his characteristic 
drawl, his good-natured simplicity, his 
provincial inexperience. But he revealed 
his unbending principle, his supreme good- 
sense, his lofty patriotism, his unquailing 
courage. He scattered the clouds of 
hatred and ignorance that deformed and 



30 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

caricatured him, and showed him in his 
daily habit as he lived, the true and 
worthy representative of America, with 
mother wit preaching the gospel of Christ, 
and in plain native phrase applying it to 
a tremendous public exigency in Chris- 
tian America. The Yankee dialect of 
New England, like the Yankee himself, 
had become a jest of farce and extrava- 
ganza. But, thoroughly aroused, Lowell 
grasped it as lightly as Hercules his club, 
and struck a deadly blow at the Hydra 
that threatened the national life. Burns 
did not give to the Scottish tongue a 
nobler immortality than Lowell to the 
dialect of New England. 

In June, 1846, the first Biglow paper, 
which, in a letter written at the time, 
Lowell called " a squib of mine," was pub- 
lished in the Boston Courier. That squib 
was a great incident both in the history 
of American literature and politics. The 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 3 1 

serious tone of our literature from its 
grave colonial beginning had been al- 
most unbroken. The rollicking laugh of 
Knickerbocker was a solitary sound in our 
literary air until the gay note of Holmes 
returned a merry echo. But humor as a 
literary force in political discussion was 
still more unknown, and in the fierce 
slavery controversy it was least to be an- 
ticipated. Banter in so stern a debate 
would seem to be blasphemy, and humor 
as a weapon of antislavery warfare was 
almost inconceivable. The letters of Ma- 
jor Jack Downing, a dozen years before 
the Biglow Papers, were merely political 
extravaganza to raise a derisive laugh. 
They were fun of a day and forgotten. 
Lowell's humor was of another kind. It 
was known to his friends, but it was not 
a characteristic of Lowell the author. In 
his early books there is no sign of it. It 
was not a humorist whom the good- 



32 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

natured Willis welcomed in his airy way, 
saying that posterity would know him 
as Russell Lowell. Willis thought, per" 
haps, that another dainty and graceful 
trifler had entered the charmed circle of 
literature that pleases but not inspires. 

But suddenly, and for the first time, 
the absorbing struggle of freedom and 
slavery for control of the Union was il- 
luminated by a humor radiant and pierc- 
ing, which broke over it like daylight, and 
exposed relentlessly the sophistry and 
shame of the slave power. No speech, no 
plea, no appeal was comparable in popu- 
lar and permanent effect with this pitiless 
tempest of fire and hail, in the form of 
wit, argument, satire, knowledge, insight, 
learning, common-sense, and patriotism. 
It was humor of the purest strain, but 
humor in deadly earnest. In its course, 
as in that of a cyclone, it swept all before 
it — the press, the Church, criticism, schol- 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 33 

arship — and it bore resistlessly down upon 
the Mexican War, the pleas for slavery, 
the Congressional debates, the conspic- 
uous public men. Its contemptuous scorn 
of the public cowardice that acquiesced 
in the aggressions of the slave power 
startled the dormant manhood of the 
North and of the country. 

" The North hain't no kind of business with nothin', 

An' you've no idee how much bother it saves, 

We ain't none riled by their frettin' and frothin', 

We're used to layin' the string on our slaves, 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he. 

Sez Mister Foote, ' 

I should like to shoot 
The holl gang, by the great horn spoon, sez he. 

" The mass ough' to labor an' we lay on soffies. 

That's the reason I want to spread Freedom's aree. 
It puts all the cunningest on us in office, 
An' reelizes our Maker's orig'nal idee, 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he. 

That's as plain, sez Cass, 

As that some one's an ass, 

It's ez clear as the sun is at noon, sez he. 

S 



34 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

" Now don't go to say I'm the friend of oppression, 
But keep all your spare breath for coolin' your 
broth ; 
For I allers hev strove (at least that's my impression) 
To make cussed free with the rights of the North, 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he. 

Yes, sez Davis of Miss, 
The perfection o' bliss 
Is in skinning that same old coon, sez he." 

Such lines, as with a stroke of light- 
ning, were burned into the hearts and con- 
science of the North. Read to-day, they 
recall, as nothing else can recall, the in- 
tensity of the feeling which swiftly flamed 
into civil war. 

Apart from their special impulse and 
influence, the Biglow Papers were essen- 
tially and purely American. It is some- 
times said that the best American poetry 
is only English poetry written on this side 
of the ocean. But the Biglow Papers are 
as distinctively American as "Tam o' Shan- 
ter " is Scotch or the " Divine Comedy " 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 35 

Italian. They could have been written 
nowhere else but in Yankee New England 
by a New England Yankee. With Uiicle 
Tom's Cabm, they are the chief literary 
memorial of the contest— a memorial 
which, as literature, and for their own de- 
light, our children's children will read, as 
we read to-day the satires that scourge 
the long-vanished Rome which Juvenal 
knew, and the orations of Burke that dis- 
cuss long-perished politics. So strong was 
Lowell's antislavery ardor that he proudly 
identified himself with the Abolitionists. 
Simultaneously with the publication of 
the first series of the Big low Papers, he 
became a corresponding editor with Ed- 
mund Quincy of the Anti-Slavery Stand- 
ared, the organ of the American Anti- 
slavery Society, and in a letter to his 
friend, Sydney Howard Gay, the editor of 
the paper, he says : " I was not only will- 
ing but desirous that my name should 



36 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

appear, because I scorned to be indebted 
for any share of my modicum of popular- 
ity to my abolitionism without incurring 
at the same time whatever odium might 
be attached to a complete identification 
with a body of heroic men and women 
whom not to love and admire would 
prove me to be unworthy of those senti- 
ments, and whose superiors in all that 
constitutes true manhood and woman- 
hood I believe never existed." 

But his antislavery ardor was far from 
being his sole and absorbing interest and 
activity. Lowell's studies, more and more 
various and incessant, were so compre- 
hensive that if not like Bacon, all knowl- 
edge, yet he took all literature for his 
province, and in 1855 he was appointed 
to the chair of modern languages and 
belles-lettres in Harvard University, suc- 
ceeding Longfellow and Ticknor, an illus- 
trious group of American scholars which 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 37 

gives to that chair a distinction unparal- 
leled in our schools. His love and mastery 
of books were extraordinary, and his de- 
votion to study so relentless, that in those 
earlier years he studied sometimes four- 
teen hours in the day, and pored over 
books until his sight seemed to desert 
him. But it was no idle or evanescent 
reading. Probably no American student 
was so deeply versed in the old French 
romance, none knew Dante and the Ital- 
ians more profoundly ; German literature 
was familiar to him, and perhaps even 
Ticknor in his own domain of Spanish 
lore was not more a master than Lowell. 
The whole range of English literature, 
not only its noble Elizabethan heights, 
but a delightful realm of picturesque and 
unfreqented paths, were his familiar park 
of pleasance. Yet he was not a scholarly 
recluse, a pedant, or a bookworm. The 
student of books was no less so acute 



38 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

and trained an observer of nature, so sym- 
pathetic a friend of birds and flowers, so 
sensitive to the influences and aspects of 
out-of-door life, that as Charles Briggs 
with singular insight said that he was 
meant for a politician, so Darwin with 
frank admiration said that he was born 
to be a naturalist. He was as much the 
contented companion of Izaak Walton 
and White of Selborne as of Donne or 
Calderon. His social sympathies were no 
less strong than his fondness for study, 
and he was the most fascinating of com- 
rades. His extraordinary knowledge, 
whether of out-door or of in-door deri- 
vation, and the racy humor in which his 
knowledge was fused, overflowed his con- 
versation. There is no historic circle of 
wits and scholars, not that of Beaumont 
and Ben Johnson where, haply, Shakes- 
peare sat, nor Pope's, nor Dryden's, nor 
Addison's, nor Dr. Johnson's Club, nor 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 39 

that of Edinburgh ; nor any Parisian salon 
or German study, to which Lowell's abun- 
dance would not have contributed a gold- 
en drop and his glancing wit a glittering 
repartee. It was not of reading, merely, 
it was of the reading of a man of Lowell's 
intellectual power and resource that Ba- 
con said, " reading maketh a full man." 

He had said in 1846 that it was as a 
poet that he could do his best work. But 
the poetic temperament and faculty do 
not exclude prose, and like Milton's swain, 
" he touched the tender stops of various 
quills." The young poet early showed 
that prose would be as obedient a familiar 
to his genius as the tricksy Ariel of verse. 
Racy and rich, and often of the most so- 
norous or delicate cadence, it is still the 
^prose of a poet and a master of the differ- 
ences of form. His prose indeed is often 
profoundly poetic — that is, quick with im- 
agination, but always in the form of prose, 



40 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

not of poetry. It is so finely compact of 
illustration, of thought and learning, of 
wit and fancy and permeating humor, 
that his prose page sparkles and sways 
like a phosphorescent sea. " Oblivion," 
he says, " looks in the face of the Grecian 
muse only to forget her errand." And 
again : " the garners of Sicily are empty 
now, but the bees from all climes still 
fetch honey from the tiny garden-plot 
of Theocritus." Such concentrated sen- 
tences are marvels of felicity, and, al- 
though unmetred, are as exquisite as 
songs. 

Charles Emerson said of Shakespeare, 
" he sat above this hundred-handed play 
of his imagination pensive and conscious," 
and so Lowell is remembered by those 
who knew him well. Literature was his 
earliest love and his latest delight, and 
he has been often called the first man of 
letters of his time. The phrase is vague, 



-_ "^l^iL 




'^^.' 




HOME OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, CAMBRIDGE 
MASSACHUSETTS 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 41 

but it expresses the feeling that while he 
was a poet and a scholar and a humor- 
ist and a critic, he was something else 
and something more. The feeling is per- 
fectly just. Living all summer by the sea, 
we watch with fascinated eyes the long- 
flowing lines, the flash and gleam of mul- 
titudinous waters, but beneath them all 
is the mighty movement of unfathomed 
ocean, on whose surface only these undu- 
lating splendors play. Literature, whether 
in prose or verse, was the form of Lowell's 
activity, but its master impulse was not 
aesthetic but moral. When the activities 
of his life were ended, in a strain of clear 
and tender reminiscence he sang : 

"I sank too deep in the soft - stuff ed repose, 
That hears but rumors of earth's wrongs and woes; 
Too well these Capuas could my muscles waste. 
Not void of toils, but toils of choice and taste. 
These still had kept me could I but have quelled, 
The Puritan drop that in my veins rebelled." 
6 



42 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

Literature was his pursuit, but patriot- 
ism was his passion. His love of country 
was that of a lover for his mistress. He 
resented the least imputation upon the 
ideal America, and nothing was finer than 
his instinctive scorn for the pinchbeck 
patriotism which brags and boasts and 
swaggers, insisting that bigness is great- 
ness, and vulgarity simplicity, and the will 
of a majority the moral law. No man 
perceived more shrewdly the American 
readiness of resource, the Yankee good- 
nature, and the national rectitude. But 
he was not satisfied with an easy stand- 
ard. To him the best, not the thriftiest, 
was most truly American. Lowell held 
that of all men the American should be 
master of his boundless material re- 
sources, not their slave, worthy of his un- 
equalled opportunities, not the syco- 
phant of his fellow Americans nor the 
victim of national conceit. No man re- 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 43 

joiced more deeply over our great achieve- 
ments or celebrated them with ampler or 
prouder praise. He delighted with Yan- 
kee glee in our inventive genius and rest- 
less enterprise, but he knew that we did 
not invent the great muniments of liberty, 
trial by jury, the habeas corpus, constitu- 
tional restraint, the common school, of all 
which we were common heirs with civil- 
ized Christendom. He knew that we have 
Niagara and the prairies and the Great 
Lakes, and the majestic Mississippi ; but 
he knew also with another great Ameri- 
can that 

"Earth proudly wears the Parthenon 
As the best gem upon her zone. 
And morning opes with haste her lids 
To gaze upon the Pyramids." 

As he would not accept a vulgar carica- 
ture of the New Englander as a Yankee, 
so he spurned Captain Bobadil as a type 
of the American, for he knew that a na- 



44 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

tion may be as well-bred among nations 
as a gentleman among gentlemen, and 
that to bully weakness or to cringe to 
strength are equally cowardly, and there- 
fore not truly American. 

Lowell's loftiest strain is inspired by 
this patriotic ideal. To borrow a German 
phrase from modern musical criticism, it 
is the hit motif which is constantly heard 
in the poems and the essays, and that in- 
spiration reached its loftiest expression, 
both in prose and poetry, in the discourse 
on Democracy and the Commemoration 
ode. The genius of enlightened Greece 
breathes audibly still in the oration of 
Pericles on the Peloponnessian dead. 
The patriotic heart of America throbs 
forever in Lincoln's Gettysburg address. 
But nowhere in literature is there a more 
magnificent and majestic personification 
of a country whose name is sacred to its 
children, nowhere a profounder passion 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 45 

of patriotic loyalty, than in the closing 
lines of the Commemoration ode. The 
American whose heart, swayed by that 
lofty music, does not thrill and palpitate 
with solemn joy and high resolve, does 
not yet know what it is to be an Ameri- 
can. 

Like all citizens of high public ideals, 
Lowell was inevitably a public critic and 
censor, but he was much too good a Yan- 
kee not to comprehend the practical con- 
ditions of political life in this country. 
No man understood better than he such 
truth as lies in John Morley's remark : 
" Parties are a field where action is a long 
second best, and where the choice con- 
stantly lies between two blunders." He 
did not therefore conclude that there is 
no alternative, that "naught is every- 
thing and everything is naught." But he 
did see clearly that while the government 
of a republic must be a government of 



46 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

party, yet that independence of party is 
much more vitally essential in a republic 
than fidelity to party. Party is a servant 
of the people, but a servant who is foolish- 
ly permitted by his master to assume 
sovereign airs, like Christopher Sly, the 
tinker, whom the Lord's attendants ob- 
sequiously salute as master : 

" Look how thy servants do attend on thee ; 
Each in his office ready at thy beck." 

To a man of the highest public spirit like 
Lowell, and of the supreme self-respect 
which always keeps faith with itself, no 
spectacle is sadder than that of intelli- 
gent, superior, honest public men pros- 
trating themselves before a party, profess- 
ing what they do not believe, affecting 
what they do not feel, from abject fear 
of an invisible fetich, a chimera, a name, 
to which they alone give reality and force, 
as the terrified peasant himself made the 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 47 

Spectre of the Brocken before which he 
quailed. The last great patriotic service 
of Washington, and none is more worthy 
of enduring commemoration on this an- 
niversary, was the farewell address with 
its strong and stern warning that party 
government may become a ruthless des- 
potism, and that a majority must be 
watched as jealously as a king. 

With his lofty patriotism and his ex- 
traordinary public conscience, Lowell was 
distinctively the Independent in politics. 
He was an American and a republican 
citizen. He acted with parties as every 
citizen must act if he acts at all. But the 
notion that a voter is a traitor to one 
party when he votes with another was 
as ludicrous to him as the assertion 
that it is treason to the White Star steam- 
ers to take passage in a Cunarder. When 
he would know his public duty, Lowell 
turned within, not without. He listened, 



48 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

not for the roar of the majority in the 
street, but for the still small voice in his 
own breast. For while the method of re- 
publican government is party, its basis is 
individual conscience and common-sense. 
This entire political independence Lowell 
\ always illustrated. He was born in the 
last days of New England Federalism. 
His uncle, John Lowell, was a leader in 
the long and bitter Federalist controversy 
with John Quincy Adams. The Whig 
dynasty succeeded the Federal in Massa- 
chusetts, but Lowell's first public interest 
was the antislavery agitation, and he 
identified himself with the Abolitionists. 
He retained, however, his individual view, 
and did not sympathize with the policy 
that sought the dissolution of the Union, 
and which refused to vote. In 1850, he 
says, in a private letter to his friend Gay, 
alluding to some difference of opinion 
with the Antislavery Society, " there has 




fEE.: 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 49 

never been a oneness of sentiment, " that 
is to say, complete identity, "between me 
and the Society," and a passage in a letter 
written upon election day in November, 
1850, illustrates his independent position : 
" I shall vote the Union ticket (half Free 
Soil, half Democratic), not from any love 
of the Democrats, but because I believe it 
to be the best calculated to achieve some 
practical result. It is a great object to 
overturn the Whig domination, and this 
seems to be the only lever to pry them over 
with. Yet I have my fears that if we get 
a Democratic governor he will play some 
trick or other. Timeo Danaos et dona 
ferentes, if you will pardon stale Latin to 
Parson Wilbur." 

This election is memorable because it 
overthrew the Whig domination in Mas- 
sachusetts, and made Charles Sumner the 
successor of Daniel Webster in the Sen- 
ate. It restored to the State of Samuel 



50 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 

Adams the same political leadership be- 
fore the Civil War that she had held before 
the Revolution. The Republican party, 
with whose antislavery impulse Lowell 
was in full accord, arose from the Whig 
ruins, and whether in a party or out of a 
party, he was himself the great illustration 
of the political independence that he rep- 
resented and maintained. As he allowed 
no church or sect to dictate his religious 
views or control his daily conduct, so he 
permitted no party to direct his political 
action. He was a Whig, an Abolitionist, 
a Republican, a Democrat, according to 
his conception of the public exigency, and 
never as a partisan. From 1863 to 1872 
he was joint editor, with his friend Mr. 
Norton, of the North Ainericatt Review, 
and he wrote often of public affairs. But 
his papers all belong to the higher poli- 
tics, which are those of the man and the 
citizen, not of the partisan, a distinction 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 5 1 

which may be traced in Burke's greatest 
speeches, where it is easy to distinguish 
what is said by Burke, the wise and patri- 
otic Englishman, for such he really was, 
from what is said by the Whig in opposi- 
tion to the Treasury Bench. 

But whatever his party associations and 
political sympathies, Lowell was at heart 
and by temperament conservative, and 
his patriotic independence in our poli- 
tics is the quality which is always uncon- 
sciously recognized as the truly conser- 
vative element in the country. In the 
tumultuous excitement of our popular 
elections the real appeal on both sides is 
not to party, which is already committed, 
but to those citizens who are still open to 
reason, and may yet be persuaded. In 
the most recent serious party appeal, the 
orator said, "above all things, political 
fitness should lead us not to forget that 
at the end of our plans we must meet face 



52 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

to face at the polls the voters of the land 
with ballots in their hands demanding as 
a condition of the support of our party, 
fidelity and undivided devotion to the 
cause in which we have enlisted them." 
This recognizes an independent tribunal 
which judges party. It implies that be- 
side the host who march under the party 
color and vote at the party command, 
there are citizens who may or may not 
wear a party uniform, but who vote only 
at their own individual command, and 
who give the victory. They may be 
angrily classified as political Laodiceans, 
but it is to them that parties appeal, and 
rightly, because except for this body of 
citizens, the despotism of party would be 
absolute and the republic would degener- 
ate into a mere oligarchy of " bosses." 

There could be no more signal tribute 
to political independence than that which 
was offered to Lowell in 1876. He was a 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 53 

RepubHcan elector, and the result of the 
election was disputed. A peaceful solu- 
tion of the difference seemed for some 
months to be doubtful, although the con- 
stitution apparently furnished it, for if an 
elector, or more than one, should differ 
from his party and exercise his express 
and unquestionable constitutional right, 
in strict accord with the constitutional 
intention, the threatened result might be 
averted. But in the multitude of electors 
Lowell alone was mentioned as one who 
might exercise that right. The suggest- 
ion was at once indignantly resented as 
an insult, because it was alleged to imply 
possible bad faith. But it was not so de- 
signed. It indicated that Lowell was felt 
to be a man who, should he think it to 
be his duty under the indisputable con- 
stitutional provision, to vote differently 
from the expectation of his party, he 
would certainly do it. But those who 



54 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

made the suggestion did not perceive 
that he could not feel it to be his duty, 
because nobody saw more clearly than he 
than an unwritten law with all the force 
of honor forbade. The constitutional in- 
tention was long since superseded by a 
custom sanctioned by universal approval 
which makes the Presidential elector the 
merest ministeral agent of a party, and 
the most wholly ceremonial figure in our 
political system. 

By the time that he was fifty years old 
Lowell's conspicuous literary accomplish- 
ment and poetic genius, with his political 
independence, courage, and ability had 
given him a position and influence unlike 
those of any other American, and when 
in 1877 he was appointed Minister to 
Spain, and in 1880 transferred to Eng- 
land, there was a feeling of blended pride 
and satisfaction that his country would 
be not only effectively, but nobly repre- 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 55 

sented. Mr. Emerson once said of an 
English minister, " he is a charming gen- 
tleman, but he does not represent the 
England that I know." In Lowell, how- 
ever, no man in the world who honored 
America and believed in the grandeur of 
American destiny but would find his faith 
and hope confirmed. To give your best, 
says the oriental proverb, is to do your 
utmost. The coming of such a man, there- 
fore, was the highest honor that America 
could pay to England. If we may per- 
sonify America, we can fancy a certain 
grim humor on her part in presenting 
this son of hers to the mother-country, a 
sapling of the older oak more sinewy and 
supple than the parent stock. No emi- 
nent American has blended the Cavalier 
and the Puritan tradition, the romantic 
conservatism and the wise radicalism of 
the English blood in a finer cosmopoli- 
tanism than Lowell. It was this generous 



* • 



56 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

comprehension of both which made him 
peculiarly and intelligently at home in 
England, and which also made him much 
more than his Excellency the Ambassador 
of American literature to the Court of 
Shakespeare, as the London Spectator 
called him upon his arrival in London, for 
it made him the representative to Eng- 
land of an American scholarship, a wit, 
an intellectual resource, a complete and 
splendid accomplishment, a social grace 
and charm, a felicity of public and private 
speech, and a weight of good sense, which 
pleasantly challenged England to a con- 
tinuous and friendly bout in which Amer- 
ica did not suffer. 

During his official residence in Eng- 
land, Lowell seemed to have the fitting 
word for every occasion, and to speak it 
with memorable distinction. If a me- 
morial of Dean Stanley were erected in 
his Chapter House, or of Fielding at 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 57 

Taunton, or of Coleridge at Westminster 
Abbey, or of Gray at Cambridge, the de- 
sire of literary England turned instinc- 
tively to Lowell as the orator whose voice 
would give the best expression, and whose 
character and renown the greatest dig- 
nity, to the hour. In Wordsworth's Eng- 
land, as President of the Wordsworth 
Society, he spoke of the poet with an af- 
fectionate justice which makes his speech, 
with the earlier essay, the finest estimate 
of Wordsworth's genius and career ; and 
of Don Quixote he spoke to the Work- 
ingman's College with a poetic appre- 
ciation of the genius of Cervantes and a 
familiarity with Spanish literature which 
was a revelation to British workmen. Con- 
tinuously at public dinners, with consum- 
mate tact and singular felicity, he spoke 
with a charm that seemed to disclose a 
new art of oratory. He did not decline 
even political speech, but of course in no 



58 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

partisan sense. His discourse on Democ- 
racy at Birmingham, in October, 1884, 
was not only an event, but an event with- 
out precedent. He was the minister of 
the American repubhc to the British 
monarchy, and, as that minister, pubHcly 
to declare in England the most radical 
democratic principles as the ultimate log- 
ical result of the British Constitution, 
and to do it with a temper, an urbanity, 
a moderation, a precision of statement, 
and a courteous grace of humor, which 
charmed doubt into acquiescence and 
amazement into unfeigned admiration and 
acknowledgment of a great service to po- 
litical thought greatly done — this was an 
event unknown in the annals of diplo- 
macy, and this is what Lowell did at 
Birmingham. 

No American orator has made so clear 
and comprehensive a declaration of the 
essential American principle, or so simple 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 59 

a Statement of its ethical character. Yet 
not a word of this republican to whom 
Algernon Sydney would have bowed, and 
whom Milton would have blessed, would 
have jarred the tory nerves of Sir Roger 
de Coverley, although no English radical 
was ever more radical than he. The 
frantic French democracy of '93, gnash- 
ing its teeth in the face of royal power, 
would have equality and fraternity if 
every man were guillotined to secure it. 
The American Republic, speaking to mo- 
narchical Europe a century later by the 
same voice with wkich Sir Launfal had 
shown the identity of Christianity with 
human sympathy and succor, set forth in 
the address at Birmingham the truth that 
democracy is simply the practical ap- 
plication of moral principle to politics. 
There were many and great services in 
Lowell's life, but none of them all seem 
to me more characteristic of the man 



6o JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

than when, holding the commission of his 
country and in his own person represent- 
ing its noblest character, standing upon 
soil sacred to him by reverend and ro- 
mantic tradition, his American heart loyal 
to the English impulse which is the im- 
pulse of constitutional liberty, for one 
memorable moment he made monarch- 
ical England feel for republican America 
the same affectionate admiration that she 
felt for him, the republican American. 
His last official words in England show 
the reciprocal feeling : " While I came 
here as a far-off cousin," he said, " I feel 
that you are sending me away as some- 
thing like a brother." He died : the poet, 
the scholar, the critic, the public coun- 
sellor, the ambassador, the patriot, and 
the sorrowing voice of the English lau- 
reate and of the English Queen, the high- 
est voices of English literature and po- 
litical power, mingling with the universal 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 6l 

voice of his own country, showed how 
instinctively and surely the true Amer- 
ican, faithful to the spirit of Washington 
and of Abraham Lincoln, reconciles and 
not exasperates international feeling. 

So varied, so full, and fair is the story 
of Lowell's life, and such services to the 
mind and heart and character of his 
country we commemorate on this hal- 
lowed day. In the golden morning of 
our literature and national life there is 
no more fascinating and inspiring figure. 
His literary achievement, his patriotic 
distinction, and his ennobling influence 
upon the character and lives of generous 
American youth, gave him at last power 
to speak with more authority than any 
living American for the intellect and con- 
science of America. Upon those who 
knew him well, so profound was the im- 
pression of his resource and power that 
their words must seem to be mere eulo- 



62 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

gy. All that he did was but the hint of 
this superb affluence, this comprehen- 
sive grasp ; the overflow of an exhaustless 
supply, so that it seemed to be only inci- 
dental, not his life's business. Even his 
literary production was impromptu. " Sir 
Launfal " was the work of two days. The 
" Fable for Critics " was an amusement 
amid severer studies. The discourse on 
Democracy was largely written upon the 
way to Birmingham, Of no man could 
it be said more truly that 

" Half his strength he put not forth." 

But that must be always the impression 
of men of so large a mould and of such 
public service that they may be properly 
commemorated on this anniversary. Like 
mountain summits, bright with sunrise, 
that announce the day, such Americans 
are harbingers of the future which shall 
justify our faith, and fulfil the promise of 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 63 

America to mankind. In our splendid 
statistics of territorial extension, of the 
swift civilization of the Western world, 
of the miracles of our material invention : 
in that vast and smiling landscape, the 
home of a powerful and peaceful people, 
humming with industry and enterprise, 
rich with the charm of every climate from 
Katahdin that hears the distant roar of 
the Atlantic to the Golden Gate through 
which the soft Pacific sighs, and in every 
form of visible prosperity, we see the re- 
splendent harvest of the mighty sowing, 
two hundred years ago, of the new conti- 
nent with the sifted grain of the old. But 
this is not the picture of national great- 
ness, it is only its glittering frame. In- 
tellectual excellence, noble character, pub- 
lic probity, lofty ideals, art, literature, 
honest politics, righteous laws, conscien- 
tious labor, public spirit, social justice, 
the stern, self-criticising patriotism which 



64 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

fosters only what is worthy of an enlight- 
ened people, not what is unworthy — such 
qualities and achievements, and such 
alone, measure the greatness of a state, 
and those who illustrate them are great 
citizens. They are the men whose lives 
are a glorious service and whose memo- 
ries are a benediction. Among that great 
company of patriots let me to-day, rever- 
ently and gratefully, blend the name of 
Lowell with that of Washington. 



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